Urgent COVID-19 Prevention: Safety & Health communication

As Nantucket Cottage Hospital’s President, and in lock step with our Chief Medical Officer Dr. Diane Pearl, we know there is some confusion about what to do next in the midst of this unprecedented response to the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and widespread social disruption. To that end, this is our blended and well-informed opinion with insight from Asaf Bitton, MD, Assistant Medical Director of Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital,  regarding steps we must take together as a community moving forward.

What we do, or don’t do, over the next week will have a massive impact on the trajectory of coronavirus on Nantucket. We are only about 10 days behind Italy and generally on track to repeat what is unfortunately happening there, as well as much of the rest of Europe very soon. At this point, containment through contact tracing and testing is only part of the necessary strategy. We must move to pandemic mitigation through widespread, uncomfortable and comprehensive social distancing. That means shutting down work places (as much as possible), group gatherings and public events. It also means making daily choices to stay away from each other as much as possible to Flatten The Curve.

Our regional health system, and our island hospital in particular, simply will not be able to cope with the projected numbers of people who will need acute care should we not muster the fortitude and will to socially distance each other starting now. Our new community hospital is very well suited to delivering routine care and standard surgeries and procedures, but is not an Intensive Care Unit. Even moderate projections suggest that if current infectious trends hold, our capacity (locally and nationally) may be overwhelmed in the near future.  Thus the only set of interlinked strategies that can get us off this concerning trajectory is to work together as a community to maintain public health by staying apart.

We are currently canceling and rescheduling routine and non-urgent appointments as well as elective procedures at the hospital due to our ongoing coronavirus response efforts. This is being done out of an abundance of caution for the safety of our patients and staff. We certainly apologize for this inconvenience but this is an unprecedented situation for our hospital and providers. Staff members are calling patients starting today to notify them and reschedule if possible. We thank the community for its patience and understanding.

Due to our ongoing coronavirus response efforts, all patients must enter the hospital through the emergency department, effective immediately. This measure is being taken to control who enters the hospital, and is one of our many initiatives being implemented to protect patients and staff. This will also allow us to implement new screening measures for patients.

Consistent with Nantucket Cottage Hospital’s commitment to help prevent potential community spread of coronavirus (COVID-19), we are implementing visitor restrictions for the protection of our patients, visitors and workforce. To continue providing the safest care environment, temporary updates to our visitor policies have been made:

• Limit of one visitor per patient for both inpatient and ambulatory care
  • This includes all hospital, physician clinic, and emergency department visits
• Visitors may be screened for flu-like symptoms, such as fever, cough or sore throat. Any visitor with obvious signs of illness will be asked to kindly leave.
• No visitors under the age of 18 will be allowed during this time, since young people are potential infectors without necessarily being ill themselves.
• Care teams will make exceptions in specific circumstances such as:
  • End-of-life care
  • Two parents or guardians for each pediatric patient
  • Two visitors for each labor and delivery patient
  • Disruptive behavior patients
• We are discontinuing all public use of our conference rooms effective immediately until future notice. This includes cancelling events open to the public and community groups.
• The NCH cafeteria will be closed to the public and will serve employees only with ID badges